Truman's Warning

from pages 74-76 (of Ray Marcus' Addendum B: Addendum to the HSCA, the Zapruder File, and the Single Bullet Throry, 1995, self published book):

On December 22, 1963, just thirty days after the assassination of JFK, there appeared in an early edition of the Washington Post a remarkable article. Its heading read “U.S. Should Hold CIA to Intelligence Role.” Its content was a warning to the American people that the CIA must be brought under presidential control. Its author was Harry S. Truman. I submit without qualification that it is the least known important public policy statement by any president or former president in the twentieth century, and probably in the nation’s entire history. Following are a few excerpts from the article datelined Independence, Missouri, December 21:

I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency — CIA . . .

For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. . . .

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

How can it be that a statement of such obvious significance by a widely respected former president is virtually unknown to the public? I first learned of it in 1966, while reading Roger Hilsman’s 1964 book, To Move a Nation. He quotes extensively from it in his chapter titled “The Problem of the CIA.” It appears on his page 63.

This surprised me, for I thought I had followed Truman’s public statements quite carefully, and this one was completely unfamiliar to me. I was even more surprised when I checked the referenced chapter note and saw the date of publication, December 22, 1963, in The Washington Post distributed by the North American Newspaper Alliance.

I then went to the UCLA library and located a copy there. According to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, nor mentioned on any national radio or TV broadcast. (At my urging, it was reprinted in full more than eleven years after its original publication date on the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1975. There was no editorial comment, follow up, or letters-to-editor presented.)

It is not mentioned in any of the prominent biographies which have since appeared, including David McCullough’s excellent study, Truman. I have no reason to believe the authors were aware of it.

Can this be accidental? Can editors of all major newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts have really been unaware of its existence? Can such individuals looking at the Truman article really have thought, no, this is of insufficient importance or interest to reprint, editorialize on, or even mention? Such an idea seems preposterously naive. It is much more probable that the article was consciously suppressed by deliberate inattention, at decisive points of intervention. The pertinent question is — why? Standing alone, the vital significance of the article, written by the man who originally caused the CIA to be established, is almost too obvious to comment on. Here is former President Truman warning the nation, “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

If we could know to absolute certainty — as clearly we cannot — that Truman had no hidden agenda in mind when writing his article, it still would stand as a statement of the first order of importance by any objective measure. But the timing of the article makes it potentially even more crucial and explosive, for it implicitly suggests that Truman may have been also warning us, as subtly as he dared under the circumstances, consistent with his view of the public interest, that elements of the CIA may have had a hand in the assassination. Consider: Truman’s article appeared on December 22, just thirty days after JFK’s murder. The country was still reeling in shock. Rumors were rampant about possible conspiracies, foreign and domestic. Truman was not a reckless or irresponsible man. It would at least border on irresponsibility for him to release his article for publication so soon after Kennedy’s death unless he was trying to warn the public, implicitly and obliquely, since it must surely have occurred to him that his words might be misconstrued to mean just that.

This clearly is speculation — we can never know for sure unless private papers of the former president clarifying his intention eventually are revealed. But neither is there any objective factual basis for dismissing the thought; and it therefore must logically remain a reasonable possibility.

Whether or not Truman had the assassination in mind while accusing the CIA of exceeding its legal authority, it is unlikely in the extreme that the effective suppression of his article could have been anything but deliberate.

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.